What was going on when I was born?

DALLAS AT first, the tugs of war within the Dallas Cowboys family were almost imperceptible. The owner's health was failing; he needed to settle his estate. The team's confidence in the quarterback was eroding; the younger man yearned for the chance to take over. Recent drafts had been less fruitful than expected; the team was aging. By the 15th week of the season, it all began to blow open. In the third quarter of a close and critical game against the Redskins, Danny White called an audible, which was clearly not what Coach Tom Landry had wanted. The Redskins went on to win handily. The following week in San Francisco, the Cowboys lost by a wide margin again, and in the wild-card playoff game against the Los Angeles Rams in Dallas, they lost once more. Their season was over; not since 1961 had they finished with three consecutive losses. If this was America's team, America was in trouble.

Twenty years after drug abuse first became a major national concern, almost every strategy to control it has failed, and a growing chorus in Congress is saying the United States should try more drastic approaches, such as revoking foreign aid to drug-producing countries. The dimensions of the problem are enormous. At home, drug abuse leads to crime, broken lives, addiction and death. But that is only where the ramifications begin. Inducing foreign countries where drugs are produced to cut off the supply has largely failed. Federal estimates show that more marijuana, cocaine and heroin are being produced than ever before, and far more of the world's supply goes to the United States than to any other country.

Nicaraguan rebels have raised more than $10 million dollars in the last six months from private corporations and individuals in the United States and from foreign governments, including Israel, Argentina, Venezuela, Guatemala and Taiwan, according to Reagan Administration officials and rebel leaders. Each of the foreign governments has denied any involvement with the rebels. ''We're raising more than $1.5 million a month, much of it donated by private Americans and corporations, including some large, well-known companies,'' one rebel leader, Mario Calero Portocarrero, said in an interview this week. He and the other sources declined to identify any of the individuals or corporations.

From the bright heat of midday to the chilly blackness of a late summer night, the four men's semifinalists at the United States Open yesterday clawed for the right to meet in today's final, with John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl enduring brilliant challenges from Jimmy Connors and Pat Cash. With a men's 35-and-over match starting the day's program to accommodate CBS-TV, and a three-set final between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd wedged between the two semifinals, the marathon 16- set day of tennis lasted 12 hours 13 minutes. McEnroe played 51 games in 3 hours 45 minutes and Lendl 54 games in 3 hours 39 minutes, prompting questions about how either will recover in time for today's 4 P.M. meeting. McEnroe won his match by the score of 6-4, 4-6, 7-5, 4-6, 6-3 to run his streak of victories over the defending Open champion to eight and his record this year to 65-2. Lendl, McEnroe's conquerer at the French Open, where he won his first Grand Slam title, won by 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-7, 7-6. Lendl was a finalist here the last two years, losing to Connors. McEnroe will be seeking to regain the title he won in 1979, 1980 and 1981.

Having just watched Dwight Gooden beat his team with a one-hitter, Jim Frey, Chicago's manager, shrugged off the overpowering performance Friday night and said: ''Every Friday we come into Shea, Gooden beats us. Then we come back Saturday and win.'' The Cubs, particularly Rick Sutcliffe, proved their manager correct last night, stopping the Mets, 6-0, and reclaiming a seven-game lead over them in the National League's Eastern Division. The loss, which Sutcliffe engineered by pitching a four-hitter for his 14th victory against only a single defeat, was devastating for the Mets because it prevents them from sweeping the three-game series and slashing a significant chunk off the Cub lead. The worst the Cubs can do now is leave New York with a lead one game less than when they arrived.

For as long as most people can remember, Harry's Bar has been the outstanding restaurant in Venice, celebrated by Hemingway, recognized by Michelin with two stars, chosen as one of the 10 best in the country by several Italian guides and, most important, universally named by the finicky Venetians themselves as the only consistently reliable class joint in town. But Arrigo Cipriani has been worrying lately. Like the restaurant, he was named by his father after an American benefactor who helped set up the business, and he has maintained its excellence despite all the temptations of celebrity; with Taillevent in Paris, it is one of the few superrestaurants in Europe that gives as warm a welcome to nobodies as to Somebodies. Yet in recent years Venetians, especially the younger ones who will be tomorrow's regulars, have been complaining that the prices are too high and that tables are too hard to get.

INSIDE Carnegie Hall, the world does not seem to have changed greatly in the last 93 years. The stately red and gold of the auditorium is much the same as it was when William B. Tuthill built it in 1891. Outside the Hall's historic walls, however, that image of timelessness quickly fades. Within several hundred feet of the south and east sides of the building, which is on the corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, bulldozers and backhoes are pawing the ground, as crews prepare for the construction of two huge buildings directly across from each other on 56th Street. Plans for a third building - to rise on the current parking lot of the Hall itself, called the Rembrandt site - are expected to be released within the next few weeks. Together, these three buildings will contain as much as 1.75 million square feet of residential and commercial space. Moreover, with planned heights of nearly 70 stories each for the two structures across 56th Street - and perhaps as much for the Rembrandt building - they will tower over the theater and undoubtedly change the character of this relatively low-rise area of midtown.

MY father was always a storyteller. His home-room teacher at Thayer Academy used to promise her class that John would tell a story if they behaved. With luck, and increasing skill, he could spin the story out over two or three class periods so that the teacher and his classmates forgot all about arithmetic and geography and social studies. He told them stories about ship captains and eccentric old ladies and orphan boys, gallant men and dazzling women in a world where the potent forces of evil and darkness were confounded and good triumphed in the end. He peopled his tales with his own family and friends and neighbors from the surrounding Massachusetts South Shore towns: Quincy, Hingham, Hanover, Susan Cheever is a novelist whose most recent work is ''The Cage.'' Braintree, Norwell and Wollaston, where he lived in a big clapboard house on the Winthrop Avenue hill with his mother, an Englishwoman whose family had immigrated to Boston when she was 6, his father, a gentleman sailor who owned a prosperous shoe factory in nearby Lynn, and his older brother, Fred, who was going away to Dartmouth in the fall.

When Darlena Bradshaw learned that her husband, Gene, an Army enlisted man, was being transferred from Germany to California not long ago, she entertained visions of palm trees and an easy life back in the states. Instead, she and her husband and their three children are living in a tiny automobile trailer parked in a dusty, bleak campground in the heart of this Army base, along with dozens of other military families. ''They told me there's a waiting list for housing on base of seven months,'' she said, ''and the only places you can rent off base that will take three kids is $1,100 a month. Who can afford that?'' On Aug. 27, Danny Holley, the 13- year-old-son of another soldier whose family was financially distressed and had been troubled by bureaucratic snarls, hanged himself near Fort Ord after telling his mother, ''If you didn't have me to feed, things would be better.''

KONSTANTIN U. Chernenko's television appearance last week in the midst of rumors of illness, helped clear up one uncertainty about the Soviet leadership, but another was almost immediately created by the replacement of Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, Chief of Staff of the armed forces, by his deputy, Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev. Marshal Ogarkov is to get a ''new appointment,'' according to the official announcement, which went no further than that. The imprecision plus the cursory treatment of Marshal Ogarkov in the press led the rest of the world to believe that a powerful figure who had seemed destined to rise even higher in the Soviet hierarchy had in fact been demoted. The marshal has been associated with Moscow's hard line, publicly defending the downing of the Korean airliner last year, for example, but observers could only guess at what the change meant in terms of foreign policy.

Perhaps not since the the 1920's or 1930's have apartments been built in Manhattan that match in size and luxury those planned for the residential building now under construction on East 88th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues. Each of the 14 units in the condominium going up on the site of a former parking garage at 60 East 88th Street will be approximately 4,200 square feet in size and occupy an entire floor.

Notre Dame had the reputation, the expectations, the experience, the size and the magic name. It also had something it did not want or need - generosity. Notre Dame gave away the ball today five times - three interceptions and two fumbles - and that made the difference as Purdue, a 19 1/2-point underdog, upset the Irish, 23-21. This was the first game of the season for both Indiana teams and it attracted a sellout crowd of 60,672 to the Hoosier Dome in the state's capital.